To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) (35 page)

Constantine set the stolen Department of Recreation aircar down next to a large warehouse close to the water's edge. Two massive arcologs rose close by, putting the warehouse in shadows. Between the two arks and off to the north, toward the city, the buildings became larger and larger, filling in all the spaces between the arcological structures, but here most of the buildings were only five or six stories high. The ten-story warehouse was the biggest structure in the immediate vicinity and had a wide ramp up from the Bay.

"They must bring them in on barges," Kapuki said. "No guards," Bennett said, fingering the laser they had taken from a dead policeman.

"Electronic alarms, surely," Constantine warned. "The Blackshirt cops would be too busy right now," Blake said.

The group spread out, lasers and arena swords at the ready. The warehouse door was huge, almost as high as the building and twenty meters wide, but next to it was a smaller door. They lasered this one open. Ignoring the alarms that rang furiously, they cut their way through two additional doors and into the huge main room.

"My God!" Marta said.

"In a sense, yes," Blake said, looking at the massive Christ figure.

Three figures stood in the room. The largest was the twenty-seven-meter Godzilla, a huge mythological beast that looked vaguely like a
Tyrannosaurus Rex
but with spines. It stood with open jaws, its face enclosed by a safety grid that was part of a ceiling-hung service device. A massive arm had been detached and lay on the floor, partly dismantled.

"Goddamn!" Constantine groaned. "It's not working.

"Maybe we can fix it," Rio said as they crossed the big room.

"No time," Bennett said. "What about that one?" He pointed to the smallest of the three figures, a seventeen-meter Japanese samurai warrior.

"Yeah," said Kapuki eagerly.

They looked toward Blake and found him gazing with a bemused expression at the third figure, standing by itself past the spot where Kong must have stood. The twenty-meter Christ was very realistic, wearing a white floor-length tunic and a deep-red robe. It had shoulder-length medium-brown hair, a short but full beard, and was the epitome of the Anglo-Saxon Christ – blue-eyed and fair, with serene features and delicate hands. They had all followed Blake's gaze.

"Oh, no!" Constantine said.

"You can't fight with that," Kapuki insisted.

"It would be blasphemous..." Bennett said, "I think."

"It only took two to run Kong," Blake said. "We could use both."

Kapuki was running toward the samurai. Before the rest got there, she had opened the greave shinplate to reveal the passage upward, and had disappeared into the samurai's leg. Bennett jumped in after her and climbed the ladder.

"Better get back," Constantine said. "These are likely to be a little awkward at first."

"Do they know how to run it?" Blake asked.

"Everyone does. These huge robots were very popular at one time and they ran lots of vidspecials on them. I wish we had the Octobot, though. That was a terror – eight arms, all kinds of weapons as standard, about forty meters high."

Blake looked up at the big, fierce-looking samurai. "Pageant. Bread and circuses. Shows and executions presented as entertainment. Manufactured excitement. Kill a pagan for Christ!" He shook his head. "I'll never understand human beings. Or gods, for that matter."

Constantine spoke softly. "You'll make a wonderful pope, I can see that."

"That's only for–"

A screech interrupted Blake, and one arm of the samurai jerked upward. Unfortunately, it was the arm that held the eight-meter sword. The weapon slashed into and through the roof. Bits, and pieces of metal and roofing material showered down upon Blake, Rio, Marta, and Constantine, who ducked away hurriedly.

"Sorry," boomed the samurai. His other arm moved more smoothly; then the sword was pulled from the roof with a loud, ripping sound.

"Get back against the wall, all of you," Blake ordered.

The samurai suddenly made a short hop out into the center of the cleared space. It made a loud growl and the sword swept across the air two meters over the heads of the crouching revolutionaries.

"Hey!" Marta shouted. "Watch it!"

The samurai stopped moving, and its voice boomed out. "I've got it licked," said Kapuki. "I just need a little practice."

"Not in here!" Blake shouted up at her.

"I'll get the door," Rio said.

"Don't do anything in here!" Constantine shouted.

"All right. But hurry up!" Kapuki boomed. "I'm anxious."

The door moved aside with a rumbling like thunder and Kapuki guided the samurai carefully outside. Almost at once, Blake heard her using her sword, cutting slashes into walls and severing a few poles.

Blake and Constantine ducked under the hanging robe of the Christ figure and began prying open the locked access hatch in the ankle. Marta and Rio lifted the robe edge and stepped in as they popped the door open. Constantine climbed in, followed by Blake. They climbed quickly up through the shin, the thigh, and into the pelvic compartment.

The magnacreature was a scaled-down version of Kong, as far as its interior went. Blake grabbed the ladder in the center and climbed into the chest-cavity control room.

The arrangement of control panels was very similar to Kong's, and the central sphere was exactly the same. Constantine was turning on equipment, and looked up as Blake opened the sphere door and stepped in. For a second he looked angry, then he snorted amiably.

"No, I guess I would be inappropriate in this," he said, waving around him. "Whereas Christ in you, your Holiness, would be more appropriate."

Marta looked from one man to the other, and Blake said, "Later. I'll explain later."

"Your dear friend from the gladiator days is now head of the Roman Catholic Church," Constantine told her. He seemed wryly amused by this. "Pope Blake the First."

"Don't mind him," Blake said to Marta.  "Help me."

Marta and Rio helped him attach the many sensors to his body while Constantine came over and thumbed through a manual he found.

"I think you can do almost anything in this," the warlock said. "Sit, run, bend over – though it recommends you squat rather than bend over. I think they don't want you to run, though, as they had a governor on that control. But I took it off. We are on green, with a functioning fusion engine, and the last maintenance was less than three weeks ago. They must keep this thing ready for religious functions, though I can't remember when they used it last." He laughed. "But then, those aren't my biggest interests. The churches have been trying everything in the last few years: big spectacles, bigger and bloodier arena events, holograms a kilometer high of Biblical nonsense, these big brutes here. They weren't above staging a few phoney miracles, either."

Constantine backed away from the sphere and started to fiddle with more of the controls. "This isn't my field, you know. Lucky they made these things fairly simple."

"I had some training tapes on big robots, but nothing like this," Blake said.

"There, that's the last one!" Rio said, stepping back.

"Better get out of the sphere," Blake advised.

The boom of his voice startled him. Constantine made a gesture at his throat, and Blake cut the exterior speakers.

"No use everything we say being broadcast."

"All right, let's try it." Blake spoke with no great enthusiasm.

"The board is green," Constantine reported.

"Hold on!" Blake said, leaning forward. "Activate."

Constantine pushed a button and the control room lurched violently. "Goddammit, Mason, will you stand like the
figure
should stand, to start? That adjustment is a killer!"

"Sorry. Okay, screens on."

The big screen in front showed the other side of the warehouse. The side screens showed views both beneath the robe and immediately outside it. Blake had no full-length shot of the whole figure he'd had inside the Kong.

"Hold on, here we go!" The Christ turned and walked toward the big door. A treadmill beneath Blake's feet kept him walking naturally; it seemed to be connected to sensors in his hips.             

Outside, Kapuki and Bennett had devastated the exterior of the warehouse with a multitude of long horizontal slashes and a few vertical ones. The samurai stood a little distance off, and when the Christ figure came into view the Japanese bowed formally.

Blake switched on the exterior speakers. "Let's go!"

The samurai swung about, and the two enormous robots incongruously matched and controlled by an even more improbable group, started toward the center of San Francisco.

Blake-Christ walked slowly along an avenue reserved for outgoing trucks; he had gotten used to the odd way of walking, at the cost of bumping into a few buildings. He had chosen the outgoing one-way street so that he could see the approaching vehicles. Most of the ground-car traffic pulled to the side, and the drivers stared as
he
went past. Occasionally Blake would make the Sign of the Cross in the air, though mostly he just kept walking. But not even a six-story Christ figure
stopped some truckers, and from time to time he accidently knocked over a truck or stepped on one that had tried to get by. Luckily, the twenty-five-metric-ton weight of the mammoth robot crushed the trucks flat without causing Blake to become unsteady.

The smaller, samurai robot walked about fifty meters behind the Christ, and Kapuki was having fun waving her sword and jumping about. Blake regretted that there seemed to be no communication facilities available between them, or none that his inexperienced crew could find.

"Well, well, Lucifer Supreme," Constantine said happily. He waved the operational manual at Blake as he held on with one hand. "They have quite a few surprises built into this thing! Integrated miracles, you might call them." He pointed at a diagram. "Your right hand has a couple of nice gadgets built in. The tip of your middle finger can fire a lightning bolt, or at least
a
hundred-thousand-volt charge. Your index finger exudes charged gas particles that will glow, even in bright sunlight, so you can make a Sign of the Cross that just hangs there, burning, until the winds drift it away." The warlock chuckled. "You could shoot loaves of bread out your left hand, if you had any. Bless the demon, these charlatans will do anything for a laugh!"

Blake stepped over a pile of wreckage caused by the exodus of excited citizens, and kept on walking. "Can I walk on water?"

"No, but it says here you can glow in the dark. There are millions of filaments in the robe and imbedded in the outer skin."

The steel-and-concrete canyons through which Blake moved grew higher and higher around him as the buildings became forty and fifty stories high. It was like walking through a structure with narrow corridors and no ceiling. At one intersection a number of police waited, but they stared stupidly at the passing Christ figure and did nothing. They were more animated about the samurai robot, but still did nothing.

"They think we're on their side," Marta said, looking into a screen.

"We have to make a choice," Blake said. "We're coming up to where we must either go right to the Caligula or straight ahead to the city."

"Go straight," Constantine urged. "Let the others handle the Circus."

"We could head for the main Network A offices on Montgomery Street," Marta suggested.

"Marta, you and Rio come here and let me show you how this all works. When we get to the network, I'll go in," Constantine said.

Blake walked up onto a wide freeway that curved around a hill between mountain-sized arcologs. "There it is," he said.

San Francisco was a massive mound of faceted buildings that went from Pacific to the Bay and was three-fourths of a kilometer deep. It was broken only in a few places by the deep slashes of streets that separated the reinforced-concrete behemoths. But most of the streets were simply tunnels that went from building to building.

Blake was now finding it difficult to walk, and he looked at the screens that showed the ground. He stopped. "I'm too heavy for the elevated highway," he said. "We're punching holes right through."

The screens showed a freeway with long, ragged rips where the twenty-five-ton robot had punched its way through.

"Get over onto the streets, the ones on the ground," Rio said.

"I can't. There are too many wires, overpasses, bridges from building to building..." Blake said. "I'll guess I'll have to keep going on this."

Groundcars and trucks leaving the besieged city were piling up as the first vehicles stopped at the ragged edges of the footsteps. This quickly became too dangerous for Blake, so he stepped over onto the incoming lanes and walked along next to the lines of outgoing staring, frightened citizens. Then he and the samurai came onto a section of freeway that was supported more strongly, and he found they could walk much more quickly.

"Oh-oh!" Rio said, looking into a screen. "Police air-car on the right."

A large black aircar with the San Francisco Police logo flew slowly along, pacing them. Blake raised his hand and made a glowing Sign of the Cross, then left it hanging there as he strode steadily onward.

"They're still following, but they're not doing anything," Rio reported.

"Keep an eye on them. If they look like they have figured us out, tell me," Blake said. "What are Kapuki and Bennett doing?"

"Still behind, but they had a much rougher time getting over to this lane. They're about a kilometer behind us."

"Watch them, too."

Blake simply stepped over several police barricades, and none of them did anything. Marta guided him through the narrow canyons until they could go no further.

"It's through there," she said, pointing at the enormous barricade formed by the joined lower sections of several arcological structures.

Blake looked at the great wall, rising up more than three hundred meters before it separated into the different tavers that rose another four or five hundred. "Strap yourself in," he said. "We're going up."

He turned, looked back at the samurai figure, which was catching up. He pointed at himself, then up the arcolog wall. He pointed at Kapuki's robot and signaled that they should raise what hell they could.

Even before Blake could start up the wall, a troop of police came down a side street. They pointed at the figure of Christ and started toward it. Blake made ready to defend himself, then he saw the samurai robot come up behind the black-clad police and start in on them with its huge sword.

Lasers flashed, but they were no match for the big armored robot, which crushed under its feet what was not destroyed by the swift sword. Over its shoulder, Kapuki gestured for Blake to start climbing. Then she turned to wait for the next danger.

Climbing the cliff-like face of the man-made mountain was difficult. It was no question of power or strength – they had plenty of that. But climbing was vastly different than walking: the robot was in a different position entirely, and Blake had to be careful about each hand and foothold, grasping and placing the hands and feet carefully. His progress was slow, but luckily there were open-air malls at different levels, or enclosed malls where he could break the windows and use the frames as handholds. Many of the malls broke under his weight, and several times he almost lost control and fell backward into the street.

Constantine muttered spells constantly, but it was Rio who watched the screens and warned of dangers and Marta who helped monitor the functions of the huge robot.

The side of the arcowall was in ruins by the time Blake got to the top. He stood at last on the roof, knee-deep in broken floors. His legs, the cameras reported, were in tatters, the synthetic flesh ripped away and some of the metal plates dented and gashed.

"Carefully," Rio said. "We don't want to hurt people."

Blake grunted, and very slowly began to walk across the roof, shattering hundreds of solar-energy panels as he waded. His feet caught on unseen girders and parts of his tunic and robe were torn away. When he reached the far edge of the structure, Marta pointed across the narrow canyon.

"There, where that big 'A' sign is!"

Constantine stopped mumbling spells and looked at the screen. "You can't jump, you'd go right through it. Climbing down and up again would take too long." He unbuckled his safety belt and rose from his bucket seat. "I'm going up. There's a hatch at the back of the neck, too, under the hair. Reach over, punch a hole through the wall, then reach back and I'll climb on your hand and you can put me across. With you looking in their window they will probably not want to argue." He flashed a wicked smile at Blake. "Ingrained superstitious nonsense has its uses."

Constantine vanished up the ladder to the head, and Blake moved ponderously into position.

Suddenly Rio cried a warning, and Blake turned just in time to see two police aircars coming straight at him. His skin sensors told him of laser beams making jiggly lines across his chest, and his response was swift. He pointed his right hand at one of the aircars and hit it with a hundred-thousand-volt blast. The other aircar veered off; Blake hit it, too, but on the second try.

"That will bring them!" Blake said.

Quickly he reached across the deep canyon and stuck his left index finger through the wall right next to the big "A," then rotated it to make a bigger hole. Then he reached back and plucked Constantine from his neck and put him into .the opening. With the skin sensors he had a keen sense of touch or he might have crushed the black man. Then he looked around for more aircars.

"I think I'm getting the commercial channel on this little screen here," Rio told him.

Blake looked and saw himself from an odd angle, standing in the wreckage of the top of the arcolog. Peering around at the angle, he saw a crimson Network A aircar hanging nearby and made another fiery Sign of the Cross, even as he noticed the wreckage of the two zapped police vehicles.

"You know," he said to Rio, "I feel a little like Goliath waiting for David and his slingshot. I feel vulnerable!"

"You don't
look
vulnerable, though, and that is important."

The screen suddenly changed to a montage of scenes around the Caligula Arena, then more shots throughout the city. Constantine's image came onto the screen.

"Citizens of San Francisco! Citizens of the World! Rise up! Throw off the chains of religious oppression! The day has come! Fight for your liberty! Fight for freedom! No longer must the decadent heel of oppression grind into the neck of the common man! Rise up! Smite the evil minions of repression!"

"Turn him down," Blake said. "I feel as if I've heard all that before."

"Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!" Marta cried.

"What's wrong?"

Marta was pointing into a side screen, and Blake turned in the same direction so that what she saw went onto the big screen.

A crimson-skinned Devil was floating through the air at them. Its forked tail switched back and forth and its taloned hands clenched and unclenched. The figure was the archetypal Satan, horned and forked-bearded, bright scarlet and naked, but neuter. It sailed through the air straight toward them.

Blake looked above the swiftly approaching Lucifer and saw that the figure was born on cables by four huge aircars with the logos of one of the churches. The air-cars lowered the crimson robot onto the ark roof and it, too, plunged knee-deep into the structure. The cables dropped away, the aircars lifted, and the furiously scowling devil started stalking toward Blake.

"What is it?" Marta said.

"Another religious metaphor," Blake said.

He saw that combat was inevitable and, as Sergeant White had taught him, he began to size up his opponent. They appeared to be about the same height and probably were similar in weight. But the demon had claws, and Blake's Christ had only normal human shaped hands.

That forked tail may be more of a liability than an asset,
he thought.
Probably a separate person is controlling it.

"This looks like the classic confrontation," Blake said, "but I wish I weren't here right now."

Blake pointed his right hand at the demon-figure, who ducked at once.
He knows my capabilities!
Instead of firing his electrical charge, Blake made another fiery Sign of the Cross. This caused the Devil to snarl and start forward. A part of the roof collapsed and the crimson robot sank to his hips, but he quickly pulled himself out.
Made to be very agile, probably to ape the scamperings of an imp,
Blake thought.

"Strap yourself in," he said to the women, glancing at the commercial channel to see Constantine still talking. Then he gave his full attention to the coming battle.

Lucifer charged, confidently flexing his taloned hands, his wide-toothed mouth grinning widely.

Blake did not move until the scarlet robot was within arm's reach. He ducked under the thrust, grabbing the demon's wrist and elbow and throwing the monster robot in a clean hip toss. He whirled to see the robotic image of the Prince of Darkness rupture a wide section of the roof.

Swiftly the red-skinned adversary climbed from the wreckage and came at Blake's robot with a great roar. His taloned feet punched raw holes through two floors as he lunged at the Christ.

Blake aimed his lightning bolt and fired, but Mephisto dodged. Before he could correct, Blake was seized and flung to the roof. The balanced sphere kept Blake level, but the big screen was now far over his head. He rolled around but it only made it worse. Now the screen was behind him
.
and upside down.

Blake struck out blindly, hit something, missed with the other fist, then grappled with something that felt like a leg. Something began whipping at his face, and Blake ducked and clutched at the Devil's tail. The two figures rolled over twice, and all at once Blake got his orientation as the big screen appeared before him again.